Lucas Installs Glass Elevators
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| Lobby elevators, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Photo: LMNA/Jenny Miyasaki |
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has released a construction photo of Ma Yansong's North Lobby with its glass elevators, features that were previously seen only in renderings (below). The elevators will take most visitors to the fourth-floor gallery level. Two more enclosed elevators are provided for acrophobes.
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| Rendering of glass elevators |
Comments
Most of the Lucas's art will be very figurative, not abstract. Same with most of what will be presumably on display in the galleries of the Geffen. But most of its areas will be gray concrete.
It will be interesting if the Lucas (and LACMA's Broad building) ends up having a setting more in sync with the art on display than what the Geffen is all about. But I've come around to also realizing the Pereira-Hardy-Holzman buildings really needed to be replaced, mainly because their exhibition spaces were way too chopped up.
However, a major cultural building in NYC, the Geffen Concert Hall, was also redone and is named for the same donor who gave LACMA the final-clincher monies for its new structure.
I just read about design-technical issues of Manhattan's building that aren't too satisfactory. If I were a New Yorker, I'd be really irritated. So if the Geffen Galleries in 2026 are a variation of the same thing, Angelenos will be feeling the same way. Or sort of like Pereira-1965 redux.
Hopefully not, but such is the way of the world.
This was written by the same person who has criticized the Govan/Zumthor plans since before LACMA's old campus was torn down:
hudsonreview. com, Joseph Giovannini: "The rechristened David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center opened last fall amid much brouhaha, but the dirty little secret...is that, except for the concert hall itself, the public spaces—the interiors that wrap the hall—were all much better before. The ground floor now looks like an airport hotel lobby...{and parts of it now] recalls a ’60s discotheque. It’s all off-key, as if the architects had struck the wrong tuning fork."
"Being visually tone-deaf is no small irony for the institution that since the nineteenth century has paced classical music leadership...with the highest artistic standards and expectations...... But at a time when refinement is considered elitist, and disciplined simplicity stodgy, the leaders of this renovation have, through an exercise in design populism, dumbed down one of New York’s most iconic structures; we now pass through an overture of mediocrity on our way to Beethoven."
hudsonreview. com: "Many design decisions, large and small, worked against the nature of a building originally conceived as a fusion of Modernist clarity and classical order. If its architectural purity seemed austere and aloof in today’s cultural economy of instant gratification....What we now encounter is an eclectic pile-up of feel-good details nibbling away at pride, grandeur and principle...."
"No one, from the head of Lincoln Center to the architects, seems wholly responsible for a chain reaction of decisions that started with the vandalization of the building when the masterful sculptures Orpheus and Apollo were removed."
The notion that a museum would _not_ have space for an exhibition is boggling. The Frick Collection, at long last, has now corrected this deficiency.
But the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland is far worse: They typically show large temporary exhibitions only by removing all 400 works comprising their entire collection. I've visited Basel twice and their permanent collection is nowhere to be found. Quite exasperating!